Since discovering Kovid's wonderful web2lrf tool, I look at web pages in a different way. If I come across the large, interesting article on a web page, I immediately think about converting it to an e-book for more comfortable reading at my convenience in my Sony Reader. The only problem is that it takes some considerable effort at present, since I have to save the page to html, then open a DOS window (Start - Run - type in CMD, CD to the directory, and then try and remember and type-in all the necessary syntax, paths, and filenames to launch the conversion).

This morning, as I ran across a big web article in Firefox, it hit me. What about a Firefox front-end for web2lrf?!

The way it'd work... If you run across a great online article or other document you want to read off line in your reader, you'd click a little icon in a corner of the browser that looks like a book or a little bookworm or something, and the document would be instantly and automatically converted into an e-book and saved to your hard drive. Right-clicking on the icon would allow you to set options such as the place where files should be saved, etc. Or, instead maybe when you left-click the icon, a popup window would appear, letting you choose the where, filename, link-following, and other options supported by web2lrf. The latter would seem like the more powerful method since you could vary things with each e-book.

I think this might be a really useful tool, but I just don't know enough about how firefox would interact with the command line. I agree, it would be a cool little utility to have. Right now on my Mac I have an Automator script that does the same thing and works for any URL that I copy to my clipboard. I copy the URL (from a browser or email or whatever) and then run an Automator app that downloads the file and then executes the command line to convert the file to an LRF. Now if only Kovid has a command line utility to import into the database...

For anyone that every used iSilo on a palm or pocket pc it had a plugin for Internet Explorer that would do this. You also had the capability to set the link depth level as well as whether that applied to just that site or off site links as well. Was a very easy way to grab online magazines, newspapers etc.

If the utility is capable of taking variables from the command line, it should also be capable, with some adaptation, to be fed variables by a GUI of the kind I've described. The beauty of the plugin approach is that it would allow users to work in a very intuitive manner, right from within their browser. :-)

Sure, this would be a great idea, except that I don't know anything about writing firefox plugins (I use konqueror myself), but if someone wants to do this, I'll be happy to provide whatever support is needed from the calibre end.